The Bread of the Stranger

Thessaloniki, 1941. The bread goes first — not to bombs, but to paperwork — and nine-year-old Despina Naoumidis learns to tell, from a long way off, which people in the soup line will not be in it much longer.

Then the ration cards come, and with them a list: find your name, and a mark is set beside it, and you may eat. It does not feel like a snare. It feels like rescue — offered by a kind man from their own streets, who asks only to register you, so that he can keep you safe.

Across the courtyard live the Cohens — old Barba-Avram, who keeps a bright key to a house in Spain four centuries lost, and Estrella, born the same year as Despina, four steps of stone away.

A story of bread, and lists, and the strangers we choose to see. The standalone prequel novella to Fairer, Safer.